A chronicle of Mike and Julia's adventures creating a home on the Missouri range...

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Siding and Winter Wrap-up


      Another year of work in Missouri has drawn to a close. Mike and I just packed our car up yesterday, said our goodbyes, and drove into the sunrise on our annual migration east. This is a gross over-simplification of the process of wrapping up however. I have come to finally admit to myself that ever year October and November are going to be extremely busy, full months, this year being no different. A sense of urgency and impending deadline sets in mid October, with the certain knowledge of the drop in temperature to come and much to wrap up.

     This year, our biggest concern was finishing the exterior plaster before temperatures plunged below freezing and both the process of making plaster (involving bare feet for stomp-mixing up batches of sand-clay-straw plaster) and the process of it drying adequately would both become near impossible. We truly have our friend Tyler to thank for the fact that we made that deadline with several weeks of warm weather afterward to spare. Tyler ended up staying and helping us for over a month, and was instrumental to getting our second coat of plastering done. We also had a second plastering work party, which greatly helped us get a good jump start on the process amidst good conversation and company. For the entire day before Mike and our friend Fran mixed batches of plaster until we had quite a reserve built up, while I finished up trim detailing around doors and windows(the trim and assorted detailing actually took us a good week before the second coat could go on). Needless to say, many batches of clay plaster were made and applied onto bales between the first and second coats. In some places, it seems like it is almost four inches thick! 


      This brings me to one of the lessons learned from our strawbale building process this year. Somewhere in the process of stacking up our bale walls, we stopped tracking the levelness of the walls with quite the same fastidiousness that we had started with. Despite reading warnings in natural building books about this tendency, we just got off, with several corners and spots along the wall flaring out quite a bit. I think we just got so frustrated with the tedious process of notching bales around our timberframe that we started saying “good enough” and assuming we could whack the bales into levelness later. Problem was that our bale pinning system (staking and screwing wooden stakes to framing) worked really, really well. We were throwing ourselves with force against the wall and it just would not budge. We tried chain-saw trimming parts and reshaping protrusions, and still, the big bulges would not go away. We built out plaster in low spots, and put in on thin in high spots, but the waviness persisted. So ultimately, we just made our peace with an undulating wall that does not hide the fact that it is composed of bales and not your average stud frame construction. Oh well!





     The next big hurdle in the building process was getting doors in and siding up to further protect the walls. We decided on half-wall siding to protect the lower part of the walls that would be receiving the most weather—splash back rain and snow drifts, etc. The earthen plaster does a great job of letting the strawbales “breath” so that moisture doesn’t buildup excessively to the point where mold can flourish (this has been a problem in many cement-stuccoed SB buildings simply because cement does not breath well. The same is true with many well-intentioned world heritage site restoration projects of old adobe and cob buildings which have nearly disintegrated under a protective coating of cement stucco! The restorations have all had to be redone using earthen stucco!) The only downside to clay-based plaster is that it isn’t permanent, it has to be reapplied periodically as it weathers. 

Ben Law's Woodland House in England
      As for siding, we decided for siding to go with something readily available locally, which is white oak cut by our Amish friend Ivan who has a mill five miles away. We love the look of the live-edge siding on Ben Law’s house (the English roundwood timberframer who inspired the frame of our house as well). So we asked Ivan to keep one edge of our siding unmilled, just the raw bark or the logs. What resulted is kind of an organic unpredictable edge that one visitor hilariously named “the smurf house look”! My parents came down to help us again and together we cut and hung the lower boards. This is an understatement as this took us all about a week of hustle and bustle in the last of the warmish fall weather and the first of the can't-feel-fingers winter weather that blasted in. A huge thank you to them for helping us to the finish line! Mike mostly did the trickier high gable ends with help from Brian and I, again no small feat. Note the purple flashing sticking out from the bottom, which will be where we tie in a porch roof next year.

 

     Another tedious step for us this past month was closing in the underside of the soffiting, connecting the roof to the walls. We need our roof to be vented, to let in cool air flow from the bottom of the roof to the vent built into the ridge cap, so that ice dams don't happen (the idea is to keep the roof surface cool, to counteract heat escaping the roof from melting snow and creating ice that forces its way under the roof and into the walls causing water damage). This seems excessively detailed, I know, but it is a big issue for a lot of houses so most builders vent roofs in cold climates now if they don't have cold attic space to serve the same function. For this venting/closing in we went into mouse-paranoia mode, constantly scanning for where mice could infiltrate, as they surely will. We used plywood (stained darker with linseed oil and natural pigments) and a prefabricated metal flashing piece with little perforations to let air in. Oh the detailing! Every little crack and seam now filled in, we get to cross a seriously inglorious "to do" off of our list. It is satisfying to think that our exterior is pretty much done and no more high ladder work will be necessary next year.
 

     One of the more satisfying things we did in our last week was to clean out the straw mountain that had formed over the course of baling. I have been itching to do this for some time, but finally! My parents helped, loading up huge tarps full of straw and dragging them over to our soon-to-be garden site for mulch next year (yes, you read it correctly! We are taking the garden plunge next year! Woo hoo!) 

     On our second to last day, our neighbor Jake came down with three horses and his plow and we took a look at the soil together, deciding it was not too frosty to be plowed up for next year's garden site. The frost will help break up the compacted ribbons of sod that were smoothly flipped over as Jake passed back and forth with the animals. The nice thing about horses is that their small hoof size does not compact the soil as they work, unlike tractors that can create a compacted subsoil horizon, just below what is plowed. Next spring we will add compost and manure and straw and form raised beds. It is a huge sized plot (Jake really went for it), and we figure we will plant cover crops on a good bit of it to help feed the soil until we are ready to use it all. I am just so excited about it though, nothing like a waiting garden bed to plant the seed of upcoming spring in one's mind.



      Getting doors in has been a challenge as well, complete with its own learning curve. We bought nice second hand doors for probably a quarter of the price of new ones. Trouble was, they didn't come with frames and I optimistically decided to build some to fit. Doors are one of the trickiest things to get to fit well. If hung off-level, you will have a door that constantly swings out or in. If fit too snugly in its frame, swelling wood with seasonal humidity can make it not shut properly. And so on. Suffice to say, there are adjustments that need to be made to both doors in the spring (one too snug, one too gappy), but the are both shut for now. We hunted and hunted for a front door that would do justice to the character of the house and would still be in our miserly price range, but we just didn't find it this year. We opted for the very affordable "plywood and screws" door option instead, for now.

 

      As you can see in the above interior shots, we have quite a bit of plastering yet to go on the inside, another layer of finish flooring upstairs and down, rafter and floor cavities to stuff with cellulose insulation and a stack of ceiling boards to tack up. There are partition walls between upstairs bedrooms and downstairs bathroom to put on as well. Plumbing, a set of stairs and a stove instalation, oh, and a wrap around porch with several roofs, an attached pantry and sunroom yet to attach... BUT it feels like we are so close to being finished! (I can hear you laughing.) I suppose it is all relative, we have come such a long, marathonish way that the last five miles seem like nothing. But honestly, I am glad for a break from it all for a few months. And it has come right in time for the icicles to start forming and NW winds to start blasting. Goodbye house, may you withstand the winter onslaught! 

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Fall Closing In

      The beginning of fall has arrived in all of its forms--a chilly nip in the night air, leaves are tinged with brown, asters are suddenly the only wildflowers left blooming, Canada geese are honking overhead making their reverse migration, days are cut short by early and earlier dusks. Hmm. It is clearly time for us to pick up the pace on closing in the house before we too have to make our own winter migration...

   
      I wrote a little in the last post about feeling like we are passing through a dark, overwhelming chapter in our lives here, and in many ways that has not changed--the high-voltage line is still looming on the horizon and keeping me up at night, members of our community are still undecided about whether to stay here in Missouri or part ways, all that remains to be done on our house still feels overwhelming, and it keeps goshdarn raining, but.... there are also some small glimmers of light that have come our way. One is Tyler. We met him last winter and communicated some about his visiting here, so really it is not a huge surprise that he did indeed come. But somehow his arrival feels more like a visitation by a natural building angel, sent in response to desperate prayers for help... not only is he experienced, skilled and enthusiastic to help us with our house, but he also somehow fits seamlessly into our rather unusual life, bringing good conversation, laughter, and the cross-pollination of new ideas to brighten our days. I have to stop myself sometimes from begging him never to leave, which of course someday he will, but for the time being, we are blessed and so grateful for his help and presence.


Our friend Matt was swallowed by our giant straw pile at a work party! 


     Another bright spot has been help from our community in the form of a work party or two... organized somewhat frantically in the days before, we sent out calls, not really expecting anyone to be able to make it on short notice, but again, miraculously in one morning a crew had arrived and we had almost a whole wall plastered and our soggy strawbale wall disassembled. And what is even more miraculous, Mike was able to reassemble it all and finish baling completely in one more day. So we are determinedly moving forward: framing out the gable ends with the help of neighbor Brian, ploughing forward with the long process of plastering, slowly closing in all the openings left exposed. We even had a small dinner party inside on a cold evening, complete with tablecloth and candlelight. So even though it often feels like we are giant snails inching along with things, I can see we have made huge progress. A friend’s mother pointed this out to me as she had not seen it since the spring, with barely a floor on. What a difference walls make! It is almost a complete shell.

East and north sides of the house
South side with scaffolding set up for plastering
West side view, the search for a front door is on!


After a big 9 in. rain storm, our lower field was flooded and seaworthy! 

      On top of all of the house work, we have also been participating in strange harvests of various kinds. This weekend was the big sorghum harvest that our friends the Crawfords and their large extended local clan participate in every year, using the same press that many generations of their family have used in time past. We have adopted ourselves into the tradition, joining in the festive day. I just taught my first class on making and using natural dyes from native plants. I harvested flowers, berries or leaves from local pokeberry, tickseed coreopsis, wild sunflowers, walnut hulls, comfrey, and goldenrod and simmered and strained them into pots of beautiful dye color. The class was great, full of friends and new dyeing enthusiasts with white wool, silk, and cotton to experiment with. We had six rocket stoves going, fueled by sticks, and hours later, mounds of gorgeous colors being pulled from steaming pots. Beauty. (Many thanks to Teri Page for photographing the event, check out her blog- homestead-honey.com for more details about dying). Mike’s latest harvest has been the nuts of wild (and somewhat invasive) lotus plants from a nearby lake. The nuts pop out of the unusual flower heads and taste somewhat like a cross of potatoes and corn, when salted and fried and shelled. Mushrooms have been plentiful as well, and Mike’s latest food experiments have centered around creating delicious mushroom jerky. But mostly while friends and neighbors bring in their garden harvests and can-freeze-dehydrate the days away, we bide our time for the day when we too will be able to focus on food and not building. Hard to believe it will ever come! But with one month to go, our time is fully dedicated to closing in the house: with one more coat of plaster, oak siding on gable ends and the bottom few feet, and a few doors still to install, we will be hard at work.


Mike manning the fires for the class

Dye pots bubbling on top of rocket stoves

Sunflowers, Pokeberries, Tickseed Coreopsis, and Goldenrods working their magic

Wringing out the finished garments

Beautiful color! 


Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Light at the end of the tunnel


     After a rather long month of stacking strawbale walls, I am happy to report that it finally feels like we are making progress! The saga of the strawbales (and really the whole darn month) almost seems not worth rehashing here, but how else to account for what has felt like one of our darker months building our home? And what, exactly has made it feel so wearisome and worrisome? The almost constant rain and unexpected storms that jolt us from our sleep in the middle of the night so that we can once again cover our bale walls with tarps? Or maybe discovering that our 100 final bales (that we had purchased from a local Amish friend as a favor) were full of wet moldy bits, manure bits, plus had the unfortunate habit of distorting into banana shapes?  Or maybe the constant overwhelming threat of the proposed high voltage line right next to our pond, and our awkward early attempts at organizing our neighbors into a resistance group? Or the stomach-lurching discovery that several of our friends have been thinking tentatively about leaving the Missouri area for greener pastures? Or maybe the mosquito population explosion? Or the stray cats that keep adopting us? Not our finest month, for sure. But we have survived, with two cats in the yard... life used to be so hard....  One thing is for sure, our house is (going to be) a very very very fine house!

      
     For one, thanks to the help of my parents (who have heroically showed up to help for a few weeks), our friends Fran and Leah who have been helping us out Thursdays, and several work parties, we are almost finished baling! Like within 10 bales of being done! What seemed so easy at the beginning got progressively more and more tedious and slow going. The bale course that took us above the door/window height was really hard, involving lots of pesky little retied bales and ingenious problem solving as to how to even out courses and work in wood lintels, plus all the usual notching around framing. If you are ever contemplating embarking on a crazy strawbale building project, do yourself a favor and don't put in any windows or doors! It will be easy and rewarding, not to mention plenty warm... 




      We were pretty eager to move into plastering, as you might imagine. A change of mediums is always a bit exciting, something new. We decided to dig clay for our plaster from behind our house, where we want to put in an underground cistern. It turned out to be an excellent spot, with only one inch of top soil before we hit straight clay! To all you potters out there, may I recommend Missouri as an optimal location to resettle? No shortage of clay here, that is for sure. We ordered a truck load of sand to be delivered, and--in classic fashion--we had yet another "takes a village" moment when the truck got stuck down a hill and I had to go running to our neighbor Don to help us out with his tractor. Bless his servant's heart, he saved the day yet again! Aside from that snaffoo, plastering has been going smoothly, or should I say roughly, since it is the rough coat of plaster? (Haha, forgive me.) My mother has since been rocking out the plastering, but that is not surprising since it has always been one of her skills/affinities...



    Another step that we've been working on is tedious detailing with tar paper flashing and diamond lath (otherwise known as blood lath since it is apparently a lethal weapon that has yielded us countless gusher-scratches!) The tar paper acts as a preventative against air-leaky cracks in the plaster as it shrinks away from the wood, and the lath is necessary since plaster doesn't stick to tar paper. The layers are beginning to get complicated as we prep the wall for our rain screen oak siding which transitions halfway up the wall into straight plaster. But my dad and I have kept at it and we just installed our first few windows today! Okay, getting ahead of myself... plaster. We have almost one long wall finished, having gone through almost a dozen large tubs full of plaster, mixed by hand and foot. This is one messy phase of the project for sure, and we have been leaving the work site thoroughly coated in mud (which, it should be noted, is actually kind of effective against the mosquitos!)




      While this recent burst of progress on the house is exciting, what is even more exciting is our progress resisting the power line! A few of us concerned and closely affected neighbors began meeting, with more and more surrounding neighbors joining in. We decided on some small action steps to consolidate as a group and get out the word to the northeast Missouri community, which culminated last night in an open meeting that we hosted in a public building. We did a pretty mediocre job advertising and flyering for the meeting, and weren't quite sure who would show or what would transpire, but the turnout was huge! Well over a hundred people came (standing room only) and all sorts-- college students, public media, farmers and their families, heavy hitters like the former university president and a state representative showed up even, and everyone was livid about the power line, sharing powerful stories about how much their ancestoral farms mean to them and such. A lot of information was shared about the situation and a lot of brain storming happened. It was way beyond my highest hopes for the event and we were able to come out of the evening with huge momentum--five action committees (legal, health, PR, political, fundraising), the state rep's word to help us set up public hearings with the Mis. Public Service Committee, and another meeting slated in a week. A bigger meeting in a bigger venue. Suddenly our little neighborhood committee with a piddly budget has blown up big! Still, we didn't do half bad, having scrambled to have yard signs printed, beautifully designed flyers to hand out (thanks Jerry), media in attendance with interviews set up, and our friend Ethan leading and moderating the dialogue (he did an amazing job tracking everything and moving us toward organized action and consensus!) I have not before now been a part of much community organizing, so all of this is new and pretty exhilerating to be a part of. There was a moment in the evening when I realized how very... American it all felt, in the best possible sense, truly democratic, a power-of-the-people moment, especially in concert with having a local politician in attendance who actually seemed to be interested in representing our positions in the matter.... fancy that! So watch out Ameren, we are coming at you from every direction with guns blaring (and knowing some of the folks in the crowd last night, that may be taken literally!)


Thursday, August 7, 2014

We've got bales! And bigger problems...


    Yay! We finally found bales! After an exhausting search following every lead we could think of, and one disastrous advertisement in the local paper (not specifying straw and not hay, leading to about twenty calls offering all manner of fescue, alfalfa and the like in bale form... d'oh!), we finally found the barn of straw at the end of the rainbow. Well, really it is our neighbors Don and Dana that found it and called us from their vacation, six time-zones away in Hawaii, to tell us about it! (How is that for above and beyond?) The bales had to be perfect-- tightly packed, full straw, with a moisture percentage reading under 15%, and they were! Thanks to the help of a few of our young strapping neighbors, John and Dan, we took a road trip an hour east and loaded and loaded and loaded our communal truck and trailer, not unlike a game of 3-D tetras, fitting bales into an interlocking matrix for their long ride home! I swear, a day of throwing bales around will wreck you. When I think back to the now three days I have spent staggering around behind a trailer trying to toss a bale up to an impossibly tall stack, my arms limp as spaghetti, hands blistered from the baling twine cutting in... I keep saying "not again" and yet somehow it happens! All I can say is bless our friends for coming along for a long, long day.  

Deranged from the exertion... Dan and Mike loading up bales


Rolling onto Frontier Lane in one piece

Bales in their staging space... our second floor! It was a good test of our newly installed oak floor beams,  showing only a sliver of deflection.

     
      Of course, preparations for this next bale-stacking stage have been seemingly never-ending. All of the detailing that needs to be thought out and installed ahead of bale really has been mind-jamming at points. First there was the "toe-up" you can see being installed by Mike and his cousin (who visited for a few days) around the perimeter of the floor platform. This elevates the bales in case of water pooling or some such disaster. It also help to distribute the load of the bales evenly across the floor joists. After that, there was the process of framing out the rough openings for doors and windows, with much detailing to come as we build out wide sills and seal up the gaps after installation. It took us much consideration of what heights would work for over-counter windows vs. bathroom windows vs. windows with bench seats in front. We have been combing through both used/donated and discount site-rejected windows at warehouses trying to match up U-factors and solar heat gain co-efficients with which direction they will be facing: to the south, we want high heat gain to maximize our passive solar design, and to the north, the opposite. We finally matched them all up and are happy with our selection of mostly wood, double-paned, low-e argon filled windows and doors for a fraction of the price new. All of this penny-pinching is getting a bit exhausting, but we knew this was one area where we could really blow our budget if we weren't careful! 

     After some more consideration of how to keep the bales mostly dry in perpetuity, we decided on a half-wall "rain screen" of vented oak siding, which of course needs support framing embedded in the bale. So again, another day spent measuring and cutting and installing for that. Just when the bales were beginning to seem like a distant reality, we realized one day that we were ready to actually start stacking! And once we started, we realized we were flying along, working at the pace of about one whole-house course per day. Notching the bales to receive the framing is the slowing factor for sure, but getting a good tight fit is worth it. When we reached a point at which we needed a smaller bale to fit, I was able to retie the bale into two half-bales with the help of our neighbor Beth's "bale needle," a long thin piece of metal with a handle and notch cut into it to feed some baling twine through the middle of the bale. The process, all in all, is actually pretty fun and satisfyingly quick, not unlike a giant set of children's building blocks. All of a sudden, our walls are closing in and things are beginning to feel very house like.

Threading the bale needle

Mike notching the bale the quick way, with chainsaw.
Handcutting with a saw, the slow way, is the method I prefer.

     So things are going swimmingly with our construction process, so what is the aforementioned trouble? About a week ago, we received word in our mail box (along with all of our neighbors) that within a half-mile of us a high-voltage power line (435,000V) is slated to be routed through. A midwest power company, Ameren (cue: ominous music and thunder claps), has deemed it necessary to extend their grid and I guess it looks like northeast Missouri makes a cheap and convenient shortcut from Iowa to Illinois. The route map was vaguely zoomed out, and we weren't sure where the two proposed options would fall exactly, but days before the first scheduled community meeting, they released images online. And wouldn't you know it? Our house is 900 feet from one of them! It would cut cleanly through our neighbor's land to the north of us, and perhaps would involve cutting some of our forest. This news, of course, is devastating to us and our neighbors, especially as we learn more about the health risks of living close to electro-magnetic fields and imagine what will happen to our beloved Bear Creek once it is shorn of its vegetation and flanking old-growth trees (somehow the route designers thought it best to run a route directly over a creek bed for several miles, I guess thinking no one would care about that land?). Our priorities now seem totally rearranged and we have been rallying as many neighbors as we can to speak out, but the problem is, the alternative route is no better. It would cut very close to our friend's the Crawford's land as well as Amish friends who live a few miles north. And directly over their Amish schoolhouse. And as I have talked to more people affected, I can see that part of their strategy is to divide communities and families and neighbors over this--for example, one of our neighbors, Lavern, would have one route go over his house or the other route go over his daughter and grandchild's house! Not okay!
      
     I suddenly feel very powerless and ill-equipped to be taking on a power company, and struggling to know the best strategy of resistance. Do we cooperate and politely suggest alternative deviations that would be less impactful? Do we get angry and threaten to fight? We and a group from our community talked with company reps at the meeting, registered ourselves and the particulars of our land--floodplains, oldgrowth, creek, marsh land, our Quaker meeting worship space, the homeschool, the education centers and new Catholic Worker house, plus all the houses of neighbors with small children and concerns about increased risks of childhood leukemia and like. We pointed out that several thousand young university students and environmental activists come every year from all over the country to our neighbor's education center and that we are no strangers to direct, non-violent action and protest (bless our friends for being onboard to resist with us!) I went door to door letting neighbors know and passing our surveys for them to send in to the company. Many of them are just as irate and freaked out as us. Now I am thinking about contacting local representatives and legal aid and seeing if there is any precedent for resisting such infrastructure: maybe they do have eminent domain and we are just plain screwed. Or maybe not? I am even going to look into environmental protections we could apply for ("gee... we have been seeing bald eagles in our neighborhood lately.... maybe there is a nesting pair in our woods?") This is everything I can think of so far, and I have no idea what will work, but I am feeling fired up with my love for the land and all the creatures that exist on it, especially the humans. And no, the irony is not lost on us that even though we are non-electicity users totally "off the grid" so to speak, the grid has found us none the less... 

So if anyone out there reading this has ideas about what would make an effective response in such a case as this, please let us know! The next round of meetings is in October. And we will learn December of their final decision. They have a website: www.ameren.com/MarkTwain/Pages/MarkTwain.aspx

Saturday, July 19, 2014

The sweet and the stormy

    
     
      This blog post is well overdue, and for that I apologize! The truth is that this past month or so has been somewhat overwhelming in both good and bad ways. Let me start with the good. We have a floor in our house now. And the floor has been enabling wonderful things. For one, I turned 32 in June and we hosted our first party in our house to celebrate! It feels exciting to finally have a big space to host gatherings in, the floor having turned our cumbersome large frame into an open-air pavilion of sorts. It has been suggested by several friends that we should just keep it this way... with 360 views, the sunset in the background lighting up tree canopy on the opposite side, the birdsong and breeze all providing the backdrop for our gatherings. Well, it does feel kind of perfect on evenings such as these! But come November, I have a feeling we will be glad for some insulated walls, even if they do compromise the views. 

     The floor itself was a score--old barn wood that a nice local man gave us a good deal on. The patchwork nature of old paint, weathering, and different plank sizes once puzzled together makes for a collage of sorts underfoot, and I find myself thinking that my grandfather (himself a collage artist and sculptor) would appreciate the aesthetics of it. Eventually, it will get covered over with finish flooring, but for now I have been admiring it and ruminating on creating a house is not that far off from creating a huge artwork of sorts, a giant sculpture. Our friend's children seem to get it, and have been inspired to create their own masterpiece houses when they come over to gatherings. It is nice to lose track of what they are doing for an hour and then look up to see several three year olds working together to lug a heavy log over to their play house. Built-in mailboxes, chicken coops, gardens, windows, and a giant catapult have all manifested in their joint creations. It is fun to witness how cooperative, imaginative, and creative these kids are when given some friends, a patch of dirt and some scraps. Not unlike their parents!





      What else? On the 4th of July we celebrated another Inter-dependence Day at our friends John and Holly's farm. Holly is a talented acupuncturist who recently treated a client she knew couldn't afford services. He runs a fireworks tent and offered to compensate her in fireworks, and being the generous gift-economist that she is, she agreed and we all got to participate up close in one heck of a show in addition to the usual delicious feast! Mike's parents were in attendance, as they came for a "workation" to help us out for a long weekend. They were hugely helpful in framing out east and west porch floors (necessary to start baling) and insulating with cellulose under where the strawbales will sit. Mike's father Sam, himself a doctor in his usual work sphere, likes to jokingly grumble about feeling like he has been "restructured" into a lowly menial-work position in some communist regime. Hopefully some day they will be able to come and actually kick their heels up when they visit, reminiscing about which board and joint they were responsible for back in the old construction days...


     And mostly the weather has been beautiful, the butterflies and wildflowers have been abundant, and we actually have one patch of accidental garden growing along! I had almost given up in the poor soil in this one little bed as it stunted everything I planted in it last year. I mixed in some compost and all of a sudden we had volunteer squash and tomatoes (thank you half-finished compost!) Something of a three-sisters bed with the addition of lettace seeds that I sowed this year, the squash leaves have been shading the lettace to extend its season by almost a month, and the tomatoes pop up above the broad squash leaves. We have barely had to weed, and now our mystery squash are revealing themselves to be... spaghetti squash! It has been an unexpected treat to watch it all unfold, and hopefully to eat as long as the rabbits don't discover it first.


     The last treat of the season has been a new birth in the neighborhood. John and Regina's healthy new baby girl Johanna arrived right on schedule, and thanks to our local midwife Alyssa and her team, it happened "naturally" right down Frontier Ln. at their home! In fact, Regina gave birth in a tent that she set up for the purpose. I have to admire them for their courage in having a baby their first season on their land, still a bit half-homed at the moment. While they hoped to have a small cabin finished, it just hasn't happened (construction projects tends to run notoriously late in case you hadn't noticed!) Still, they have big support in our community who have all been pitching in to cook meals and wash diapers and such. And I know they will figure out something for winter, perhaps renting in town. I have been trying to imagine what it would be like to have a small infant along for the journey with us in our given circumstances, and it just seems like it would be overwhelming if not impossible. Yet women worldwide manage it somehow, even in the midst of war and displacement and natural disaster! And Regina is one of the strongest and most determined mothers I have witnessed, biking to her midwife appointments (at 8 months pregnant, 15 miles away!), working on their house up until the last weeks. With such a beautiful little being in your midst, it is hard not to have faith that all is possible. I trust their family will prevail, and the amazing weather this past week feels like a small blessing on them while they recuperate and settle in.



     Okay, that leads me to the bad-overwhelming of late. Mike left with his parents a few weeks ago for a family reunion, and almost as soon as he left, disaster struck with me alone. A huge storm blew in with strong winds and almost hurricane like conditions. I am fortunate to have amazing neighbors Brian and Teri who were tracking the progress and came down to get me right before the worst hit. It was eerily calm and I had fallen asleep waiting for something to happen. I figured that this, like most storms, wouldn't really do much damage to our campsite and we would weather-through okay. Thankfully, Teri woke me up and we drove up to their house where I stayed overnight because the next morning when I came down to check on things, I found that our tallest tree, a massive 70 ft. red oak, had cracked at the base and fallen just feet away from our tent structure. In fact, it landed right where my car had been parked the night before. It took out two smaller trees with it and the whole mass of trunks and branches somehow miraculously had fallen in the negative space between our structures! This has been my worst fear camping out for years, and I have crouched in terror listening to thunder getting closer and closer in past storms. As overwhelming as it has been to start cleaning up the mess, I just feel so lucky to have not been there! It turns out that the base of the tree was quite rotted in the interior and it was a bit of a ticking time bomb. I'm grateful it chose to wait until we weren't there, and to fall in the least-damageful way possible (as if it did indeed "choose" any of that!)


      I have also been feeling somewhat daunted by the next hurdle in our building process-- and that is that we have no straw bales. It is straw season, and yet all the local farmers I have talked to have had miserable wheat crops, not even worth harvesting, thanks to hale/storm damage. Too much rain has meant straw hasn't dried properly either, so we are having to widen our search considerably. Plus less and less farmers are square baling, opting for big round bales instead. Our kind neighbors (who have saved our skins more than once) Don and Dana have been racking their brains and making all the calls they can to farmers they know, and I just placed an ad in our local "trader" newspaper... "desperately seeking straw!" Or something like that. We will see if we get any nibbles back. We may just have to bite the bullet and pay extra to have it trucked in from afar. Or to have someone's last years straw re-baled into squares. I guess sometimes you luck into the good deal, and sometimes you have to pay the piper for forces out of your control... Funny the reversal of weather prayers issuing from our mouths-- in past years, it was for rain to break the drought, and this year, it is for the storms to stop and a nice long drought month to help us get some rain-sensitive baling work done on the house! The next blog post will tell. In the meantime, I have been notching in our second floor beams, stalling for bales, and for Mike to return. The time to start making progress on the house is here... framing in our doors and windows, nailing in our toe-ups, ordering materials for plastering and flashing and a dozen more things it seems. Wish us luck and some dry weather!